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The Charleston massacre at a historic black church served as a wake-up call in the U.S. to what some have dubbed “the other terror” — the threat posed by white supremacists, right-wing extremists and anti-government zealots.

Translation: the threat not posed by Al Qaeda or Islamic State extremists, which dominate today’s headlines and political agenda.

Washington’s New American Foundation released a study last week showing that nearly twice as many people were killed in the U.S. by non-Muslim perpetrators.

According to groundbreaking research now being done in Canada, similar patterns can be seen here, with a consistent level of right-wing extremism throughout the country’s history.

That wouldn’t come as a surprise to security and law enforcement officials on either side of the border, especially when it comes to so-called “lone wolf” attacks, such as the June 17 murders of nine black congregants at the South Carolina church.

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These types of attacks are often cited as the most pressing concern, due to the difficulty in detecting or preventing them.

However, when thinking of lone wolf attacks today, what comes to mind is Ottawa’s Parliament Hill shooting in October that killed Cpl. Nathan Cirillo. The shooter said he was motivated to avenge Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan and may have found inspiration for his attacks online with Islamic State propaganda.

Yet an internal Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) briefing note, obtained by the Star under access to information law, warns that right-wing and white supremacist views have been the “main ideological source” for 17 per cent of lone wolf attacks worldwide.

They too often seek inspiration or acceptance of their racist views online — and white supremacist websites in the U.S. reportedly increased following the election of U.S. President Barack Obama.

The CSIS document was written for the service’s assistant director, Michael Peirce, before his appearance before the Senate committee on national security, just five days after Michael Zehaf-Bibeau fatally shot Cirillo at the National War Memorial and stormed Parliament.

It cites trends worldwide, but looking at data compiled by the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, right-wing and racist ideology is behind the majority of attacks in Canada too.

In the last 15 years, 59 per cent of lone wolf attacks were ideologically motivated by the white supremacist movement.

The Canadian Incident Database is the first of its kind in the country and tracks incidents of “terrorism or violent extremism” since 1960, logging more than 1,800 occurrences, ranging from vandalism of mosques or synagogues to the Air India bombing in 1985, which killed 329, the second deadliest single act of terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Many of the cases would be unknown to most Canadians and may not have been classified as terrorism or extremist crimes in the past, such as the gruesome, but largely unreported murder of 15-year-old Aylin Otano-Garcia in June 2000. She had come to Canada with her family from Cuba nine years earlier and, with her flawless French, was considered a native Quebecer to most.

But as the court heard during the trials of the two young offenders charged with her death, they looked down on her as an immigrant. One of the suspects, who was also 15 at the time of the attack and never identified due to laws governing young offenders, had admitted to worshipping Adolf Hitler.

The two boys were convicted of conspiring to lure Otano-Garcia to a sandpit, where she was beaten to death with a baseball bat. “I did it because of my racist Nazi beliefs,” one of the boys reportedly told police, according to reports of the trial.

Despite the prevalence of right-wing crimes such as this and others, they are often not covered by the media or spark the same political reaction as international or transnational terrorism.

There are a variety of reasons why, says James O. Ellis, a Vancouver-based research affiliate at the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, and project leader of the database.

“One reason is it’s part of the background noise of our societies; it’s often not as spectacular and lower technological means are used, like clubs or arson and Molotov cocktails as opposed to truck bombs,” Ellis said in an interview.

He also said the shifting definitions and debates of what constitutes terrorism make it difficult to track or quantify.

“Language matters for sure and it changed after 9/11,” Ellis said. “The longer sweep of history is important too; we didn’t use to include anti-abortion attacks as terrorism and now we do.”

Ellis’s interest in terrorism began well before the Sept. 11 attacks.

He was in his last year of high school in Oklahoma when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City was bombed on April 19, 1995. Ellis watched the event unfold on television, the image of a firefighter carrying the limp body of Baylee Almon forever seared in his memory as it was for many Americans that day.

Ellis remembers the man who would become his future mentor, Prof. Stephen Sloan, saying in a television interview in the bombing’s immediate aftermath, “don’t jump to conclusions,” as commentators were surmising that the bomber was from the Middle East.

The Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 people dead and hundreds injured was set off by Timothy McVeigh, an anti-government terrorist who was executed for his crimes in 2001.

Ellis later went on to study terrorism and eventually immigrate to Canada.

“It’s important to remember terrorism doesn’t just happen in big cities; it isn’t just carried out by who you think; it doesn’t have to be done by a large network; it can be done for strange or hideous reasons,” he said. “It’s not a threat that knows no bounds but it’s also something that can surprise you.”

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